Of all the people close to the President, Karl, you know best that I had been
warning from the start that Saddam had no WMD and was no threat to anyone.
Unlike George Tenet of the CIA, I had done my homework, and every piece of
evidence I developed I sent to you and to Dick Cheney and his staff. Now that
President Bush looks like a loser in November, because all of you ignored my
counsel, I can only say your only chance of winning re-election is if you
replace Cheney with Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security. Mr. Bush should
have picked him in the first place, but the neo-cons had correctly sized him
up as a "diplomat," not a "warrior."

They campaigned against him knowing Bush really, really liked Ridge, a fellow
governor (of Pennsylvania) when GWB was governor of Texas. They directed their
fire at him because he had not been fanatically "pro-life," although
their real reason was that he would never have fed the President the
"disinformation" that Cheney served up to him daily, as prepared by
the neo-con kitchen cooks, Cheney's old pals: Perle, Wolfie, Rummy, Gaffney,
ad nauseum. If President Bush, on your expert political advice was to bounce
Cheney for Ridge, he would stand a chance of winning in November. If he clings
to Cheney, the two will go down together. A switch to Ridge will at least tell
the country and the world that a second Bush administration will foreswear
pre-emptive war as a substitute for diplomacy.

I've written tons of stuff on all this over the last dozen years, but will
append a "memo on the margin" I wrote to VP Cheney's chief of staff,
Scooter Libby, on August 27 2002. I also sent a copy by e-mail to Mr.Cheney,
who I first met in 1969, but I assume Libby had it torn up, on instructions
from the neo-cons. Please take this note seriously, Karl, and read the old
memo from first to last. And please figure out a way to replace Cheney with
Ridge.

I’ve gone over your boss’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in
Nashville yesterday, which the NYTimes published online at http://nytimes.com/international.
It is a very earnest speech about why the United States has to remove Saddam
Hussein; the case for war. That’s why I think you should have helped him go
over it more carefully, as there are a few errors in it. At the risk of
seeming picky, here they are:

1. He says that Saddam has “systematically broken” each of the agreements
he made in 1991 to “cease all development of weapons of mass destruction,”
has nuclear and chemical and biological weapons, and his regime has continued
“to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.”

This isn’t exactly right, Scooter. If you check with the United Nations, you
will find that Saddam has complied with all requests of the weapons
inspectors, who left in December 1998 with the argument that even though they
were allowed to look everywhere, they could find nothing. If you would have
watched NBC’s "Meet the Press" last weekend, you would have seen
Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, say that if he were to accept
Iraq’s invitation to return and inspect all the facilities that might have
been restored since 1998, he could give the UN Security Council almost 100%
assurance that there were no threats remaining. If you would have checked with
the International Atomic Energy Agency, you could have advised the Veep that
it has been regularly inspecting Iraq, even since 1998, and that there is no
evidence of a nuclear program. I’ve checked with our own nuclear experts and
have been advised that if Saddam would begin a program, it would be spotted
instantly by satellite. He might hide laboratory work, but if he wants a
nuclear weapon, he will have to build such extensive facilities that they
could not be hidden. As Mr. Blix explained to Tim Russert, the new conditions
for inspection are much more extensive than they had been in the past, which
means Iraq would be required to allow inspections of any suspicious site upon
demand of the inspection teams.

2. In his speech, the V.P. said that on the nuclear question, “many of you
will recall that Saddam’s nuclear ambitions suffered a severe setback in
1981, when the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor.”

What he should have told the VFW convention is that Israel bombed the Osirak
nuclear power plant, which Iraq was building under the auspices of the IAEA.
As a signatore to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iraq was entitled to use
nuclear power for peaceful means, and the IAEA would inspect the plant once it
was set up with the fissile material to make it run. If even a gram of nuclear
material was missing, the IAEA would know about it and would demand an
explanation of where it went. The bombing of Osirak was condemned by the
United States and the rest of the world in an almost unanimous UN vote,
although we have since learned that the Pentagon helped Israel blow it up
before the French installed the nuclear material. Because the Veep did not
make this clear to the VFW, I’m sure almost everyone there thought Saddam
was building nukes back then. We know from defectors who worked on the secret
nuke program which Saddam undertook AFTER Osirak was destroyed, with no
compensation by Israel for the billion-dollar loss, that it never got out of
the laboratory stage. Didn’t you know that, Scooter?

3. Mr. Cheney said “Saddam devised an elaborate program to conceal his
active efforts to build chemical and biological weapons,” and that even
though the UN inspectors “were conducting the most intrusive system of arms
control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal. Before being barred
from the country, the inspectors found and destroyed thousands of chemical
weapons and hundreds of tons of mustard gas and other nerve agents.”

This is also wrong, Scooter. When the Gulf War ended, the UN gave Baghdad six
months to get rid of all of its weapons of mass destruction. If you check with
Scott Ritter, who was the senior American on the inspection team from
1991-1998, he will tell you that the biggest complaint the team had was that
Iraq was destroying weapons left and right, and claimed to have destroyed them
all within the six months. In other words, Ritter said that the team would
rather that they had left the weapons intact so he could have observed their
destruction and accounted for everything. The inspectors did not “find”
“thousands of chemical weapons,” etc. They “found” nothing. NOTHING.
Everything they destroyed was with the assistance of the Iraqi government. To
this day, Ritter says that the only remaining work to do is to account for
some of the material that is in the government’s records. Iraq’s
Ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Aldouri, told Bob Novak on his CNN
show over the weekend that his government believed the inspections were
“finished” when the inspectors left Iraq in 1998, saying they could not
find anything. Aldouri says the invitation to inspectors to return, to finish
up what they say they might have missed, is without preconditions. They can
come ahead. If the Veep was busy writing his speech over the weekend, he might
have missed the Novak show. You should have told him about it, Scooter.

4. In the VFW speech, he said “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction.”

This is absolutely wrong. We know he has the material to make weapons, but
there is no evidence that he has done so. It is very hard to weaponize
material. The U.S. Army War College experts tell me that poison gas is not
even considered a weapon of mass destruction, because it is so ineffective in
killing masses of people. In other words, there is plenty of doubt, not “no
doubt.”

5. The V.P. repeated the assertion that Saddam “has already shown his
willingness to use such weapons and has done so, both in his war with Iran and
against his own people.”

He is half right, Scooter, in that he did use mustard gas in the eight-year
war with Iraq, but you must have read in the NYTimes that the Reagan
administration knew all about that and was still helping the Iraqi army,
because we did not want Iran to win the war. There is no evidence he ever used
gas against his own people. The lurid pictures of Kurds killed by gas at
Halabja, a Kurdish town inside Iraq near the border with Iran, do not prove
anything. The U.S. Army War College, in cooperation with the Defense
Intelligence Agency, determined that the dead were not killed by Iraqi mustard
gas, but by a cyanide-based gas. As Israel was supplying Iran with weapons
during its war against Iraq, you should check with the DIA, as it would know
where the Iranian gas came from.

6. Then the Vice President makes the case that Saddam is inherently bad
because he “shoots at American and British pilots in the no-fly zone on a
regular basis.”

The VFW audience of course must think it is a terrible thing that Saddam would
shoot at our airplanes, and I would hate to see one of them shot down, but the
“no-fly zones” were set up in 1991 by the United Nations as temporary
precautions to protect the Kurds in the north and the dissidents in the south
from Iraqi military action. They were not set up to permit U.S. and British
airplanes to bomb whatever they wish in those zones, which is what has been
the case. The rest of the members of the UN Security Council have long ago
insisted there is no justification in saying the UN supports these actions
under the old “no-fly” restrictions.

7. Mr. Cheney says Saddam is “the same dictator who dispatched a team of
assassins to murder former President Bush as he traveled abroad.”

Scooter, this is plain silly. The only “evidence” of this was a confession
by an Iraqi whisky smuggler that a bomb he had in his van was going to be used
to kill Bush Sr. in the early days of the Clinton administration. Seymour
Hersh of the New Yorker spent months investigating and found that the
smuggler had been tortured by the Kuwaiti police into saying Iraqi
intelligence had made the bomb for him, but after he had been sentenced to
death by a Kuwaiti judge, he announced that Iraqi intelligence had nothing to
do with his intent, as he blamed Bush Sr. for having killed a dozen members of
his family in the Gulf War.

There is of course a lot more to the VFW speech, some of which I agree with,
some I would take issue with. But the real case for war made by the Vice
President is in the seven points I’ve brought up with you in the open memo.
I do hope that before Mr. Cheney gives another speech on this topic, you will
do better research, so we do not wind up going to war when there is no need to
do so.